the necessity of everyday beauty

My hair’s tricky. At least I think it is. I don’t have much, really. It’s fine and has a wave, but past a certain length it looks terrible. I don’t have a mane of hair like many of my friends do, complaining about the hours it takes for their hair to dry fully. Sisters, my hair, on its own, is dry in about 10 minutes.

And then there’s my thing about not being able to indulge in chit-chat with strangers. I bounced around from salon to salon for years and years of my life, once I stopped just putting my hair into a ponytail at my neck and cutting it myself, one big cut, with sewing scissors. I had some successes, but nothing ever stuck.

Because I was playing small. I didn’t realize that I really had to make a decision to invest, to commit to a salon, but bigger than that, to my own self, in order to be able to walk around everyday, well-coiffed head held high.

There are no shortcuts. But there are good cuts.

So about two years ago I took a good friend’s advice and set an appointment with a mutual friend, all of us connected through the good graces of yoga. This good friend of mine has exquisite taste. At her house you’ll eat the best food, you’ll have the best salt, the best wine, the best laughs, the best time. She lives a life of dreams, teaching yoga and farming and tending her chickens, who themselves carry out her exquisiteness, laying the most delicious eggs I’ve ever eaten in my life, fed a steady diet of cast-off organic greens collected from all the nearby markets. Her hair was looking fantastic, easy, every time I saw her, so I took her advice, knowing it would cost me, because the best is never cheap, but also knowing it would be worth it.

And, as usual, she was right.

It turns out I knew my stylist, the owner of the salon. She and I had been students in yoga together, practiced in the same classes, so I felt, already, like I knew her. But I didn’t really know her, as it turns out. I had no idea what an artist she really was, not just with scissors, but with the canvas that is her studio, her business. The whole thing, when you sit in the chair, inside the music and the delicious air and the art on the walls and the warm chatter, is a delight. It’s comfortable and inspiring and delicious.

The first cut was great. But the second cut, when I consented to get pink highlights, was fate.

Yeah, fate. I just referred to pink highlights as fate. I’m aware how stupid that might sound, but I assure you it’s not.

The pink highlights changed my life.

They both took me back to my earlier days, when I’d dye my own hair in the bathtub of whatever shabby flat I lived in in college, and brought me into the present. The pink highlights were for me, are for me, a way of making my real self visible. If there were a pill I could swallow, a procedure I could undergo to ensure that my hair actually grew in this color, I would do it in a heartbeat.

Everything around us should be as beautiful as we can manage. Everything. Our homes, our gardens, our workplaces, our clothes, our hair. Beautiful is in the eye of the beholder, so each one of us gets to decide what that means, what that costs us in effort and resource. For me, after years of trying to deny it, it’s so important to be surrounded by beauty as much as possible and by people who value it, as well. I don’t mean Art, really, not necessarily. I don’t mean isolating our definition of beautiful inside a frame, hung on a wall. I mean everything.

Every single time I recommit to this vision, to pink highlights, I'm delighted, jump-around-clapping happy. I've added a little more beauty in my everyday life, and that's more than a good thing. It's fate. ;>

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